1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an information search and retrieval system of structured pre-classified vectors including those representing transport paths and routes, optionally integrated with a computer reservation system for the reservation and purchase of capacity, on such structured pre-classified vectors including those representing transport paths and routes.
2. Description of Prior Art
With the advent of computer technology, sophisticated third party computerized reservation systems have been developed among others for airlines, taxis, buses, trains, ships and hotels. In all these cases the systems are dealing with substantially standardized units such as passengers, seats, cabins or rooms. In the case of third party computer reservation systems (CRS) for airlines, buses, trains and ships, the independent service providers operate between substantially discrete locations such as airports, stations and ports. The fact that most of these services are scheduled, that most of the reservation units are somewhat standardized and that the locations involved are limited, has been to the advantage of these computer reservation systems.
Nevertheless the road transport of cargo involves conditions far beyond the capability of the above mentioned systems, and although some systems have been successfully developed to search, make reservations, manage, control and optimise certain road freight transport operations, they have been designed for and restricted mainly to established networks such as national postal systems and transportation companies with extensive networks such as FedEx™ Corporation of Memphis, Tenn., U.S.A. (www.fedex.com), UPS™ of Atlanta, Ga., U.S.A. (www.ups.com) and TNT™ Holdings B.V. with headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands (www.tnt.com) that take advantage of centralized distribution hubs, scheduled and/or frequent services, standardized procedures, shared communication systems and extensive information technology infrastructures, again conveniences that are not available to the great majority of relatively small independent road freight transport service providers, which are responsible in most countries for over two thirds of all road freight transport operations.
While the flexible nature of the road transport mode is believed to be the most important factor behind its success and predominance over other modes of transport, it is also this flexible nature that generates one of the main obstacles in developing a successful, effective and reliable computer reservation system open to third party service providers.
This flexible nature is exemplified, among other ways, in that different loads in the same transport unit, more often than not, will have different time window constraints, and will have to be picked up and delivered to different places, at different times. The locations involved as origin and destination of a road transport operation are not limited to a comparatively few airports, stations or ports, but extend to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of places, post codes or discrete points, a fact that has not made things any easier for developing a successful CRS system for road and therefore also multimodal transport, on a countrywide or global scale.
Some systems as Teleroute based in Brussels, Belgium (www.teleroute.com) are based on a Notice Board system with searching processes that have overcome some of these problems by dividing the countries in areas which are normally based on states, provinces or counties, but this only gives a rough picture of what the service providers' route is, and up to where the service provider is intending to divert from the planned route to pick up or deliver a prospective consignment. Other online transport path search systems such as those developed by GetLoaded.com LLC based in Midlothian, Va., U.S.A. (www.getloaded.com) and Road Tech Computer Systems Ltd. of Shenley, United Kingdom (www.roadrunner.uk.com) have incorporated features such as the radius around certain cities or postcodes to specify circumference areas, which define the regional areas on which the service providers are intending to operate i.e. pick up or deliver cargo. While these are important improvements, the areas do not have necessarily a good correlation with the service providers' particular needs or preferences, and there has been no offer of alternative functions, such as isochrones, i.e. lines connecting places of equal travel time, to define the areas that are more suitable, convenient or tailor-made to the service providers' activity.
These search systems on the other hand do not have reservation facilities and therefore transport arrangements have to be made separately with the individual service providers, involving further communications, and in the case of contract, often further time investment in administration and payment procedures. Without a reservation system, communication can be jeopardized by barriers that arise in the multicultural environments typical of transcontinental shipments, such as different languages, standards and regulations. Sometimes these barriers are enough to discourage prospective shippers from attempting these complex transport operations at all.
Transport exchange systems as the one described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,035,289 by Chou et al, assigned to IBM™ of Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A., and Global Freight Exchange of London, United Kingdom (www.gf-x.com) are normally auction processes that are rarely instantaneous and that have internal search mechanisms similar to those of notice boards.
Many current transport path search systems such as the ones mentioned above rely basically on input of origin and destination of the transport paths as the geographical parameters and therefore, the systems for matching loads and transport paths, or asks and bids in the case of the exchanges, are limited to matching the load origin-destination pair with the transport path origin-destination pair. While this allows for some matching opportunities, these are limited, due to the multifarious nature of road transport, as well as to the scarcity of centralized hubs, a fact that leads to scattered origin and destination points that are far more difficult to match. More often than not, in these cases, the shippers or service users will not be able to find service providers that fufil their transport requirements, therefore unfulfilling the main object of the search system, due to lack of practical functionality.
In order to develop a more useful search system, the quest for obtaining a greater amount of relevant solutions for a given quantity of transport paths has led to the construction of combinations of relevant transport paths to fulfil a certain transport requirement. One of such solutions was devised by Webber et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,021,953 for the possible combination of flights, or similar hub-to-hub forms of transport.
The combination of road transport service providers to perform a specified transport task is far more complicated than combinations of air, sea or rail service providers, as unlike the road transport mode, these modes have a reasonable amount of common exchange hubs or nodes such as airports, ports and terminals. Examples of online search and reservation systems involving combinations of air transport service providers include WEB Flight Finder™ developed by AND Data Solutions of Rotterdam, Netherlands (www.and.com), Travelocity Corn, Inc. of Fort Worth, Tex., U.S.A. (www.travelocity.com) and InfoFlyway™ developed by Lufthansa AG, of Köln, Germany. No comparable system has currently yet been developed for hub independent transport modes as is generally the case of road transport, and one of the main obstacles in the development of comparable solutions for road freight including multimodal transport is believed to be that the exchange points for the road transport service providers are not only more ambiguous, but also almost unlimited, as for example, a parcel could be handed over at the side of a route on any agreed point and similarly a group of pallets could be exchanged at a depot belonging to one of the service providers participating in the combination. This type of panorama presents a complex task to an automated system in order to find and organize common exchange points to produce solutions involving combinations between two or more road freight transport service providers.
Another factor affecting the development of efficient freight reservation systems is the variegated nature of vehicles and cargo.
Cargo is substantially non-standard and except for the case of containers or pallets, loads can have all sorts of shapes and constraints, they can be stackable or not, they may have to be stored in certain positions and may have to follow a certain loading or unloading order. Reservation systems up to now have relied on the weight and volume of the cargo or on standardized cargo units to manage the availability of transport capacity.
A problem affecting automated reservation systems managing available capacity through only weight and volume, is that they cannot sense exactly the shape of the cargo and therefore have to allow for generous tolerances because of a relatively high uncertainty factor when committing the available capacity of the service providers. On the other hand, human reservation operators would use their experience, intelligence and common sense to monitor availability according to the cargo dimensions and constraints, as well as to find reasonable schemes for loading and unloading in a certain order, but more often than not, these tasks would be time consuming and when based only on a few trials, may not always result in efficient solutions. The present load third party reservation practices do not achieve maximum efficiency on spare capacity use and do not provide the precision needed to enable a service provider to delegate with a high degree of confidence, the handling of spare capacity to a third party reservation system under critical loading conditions.
Another problem affecting the transport industry is that many service providers, more often than not, do not want to give the competition information on their intended travel plans, or their available price offerings. While the exchange systems offer options to conceal, or not, the identity of the offering parties as well as the bidding parties, these systems deal with a substantial description of transport matters subject to trade, i.e. transport contracts, and more often that not, these specifications would be sufficient not to require further communications prior to a trade settlement.
On the other hand, current search and reservation systems for the freight transport industry show the identity of service providers, and therefore, are not only a source of competitive intelligence to the competition, but also enable “jumping out” of the system in order to contract transport services directly. While this is not criticisable, it promotes the use of subscription based sources of revenue to maintain the service offered by the system, a fact that makes the system “closed” to non-subscribers and therefore more limited, a characteristic that is against the very nature of a networking agent as a search engine system, which can offer a better service as a result of the greater relevant information they are able to process and present in a useful way.
The transport path search systems, unlike the transport exchanges, search for a generic available capacity, i.e. capacity between certain places, of certain types, on certain modes and maybe on certain vehicles and within a time frame, among other conditions, sometimes these specifications are not enough to ensure a smooth, well coordinated, successful transport operation for both parties and further communication is needed to ensure that the extra specifications or conditions can be met. This extra communication need, is an obstacle for search systems hiding or safeguarding the identities of the users as well as service providers and is one of the main reasons for current automated transport path search systems adopting policies offering only known identity results.